GRIDS Vancouver

@grids.reillywood.com

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An account for Reilly Wood's bad takes about cities. My good takes about computers are over at @reillywood.com

Good evening Mayor and Council, My name's Reilly Wood. I’m a homeowner in East Van quite close to one of the villages. I'd like to urge you to approve the villages proposal. I’ve had a lot of friends and family leave Vancouver because they can’t find appropriate housing. I’m sure you have as well. It’s heartbreaking every time that happens, and if we’re going to reverse that trend we need a lot more homes. Good news is, the Villages allow exactly the kinds of homes people want. They’re low-rise buildings, on quiet residential streets, close to shops, in the best city in Canada. Living in these villages would be a dream for so many people who might otherwise be forced out to the Valley, or Calgary, or wherever. So I think this is a great plan, and I want to be clear that it’s your plan, it’s ABC’s plan. In 2023 Ken Sim held a news conference where he called this one of his “bold policy ideas” to get more housing built, and then he wrote and carried a motion directing staff to accelerate the Villages implementation. I thought that was awesome, that’s leadership, it’s showing a positive vision of what Vancouver could be and making it happen, we need more of that. And this wasn’t just a promise to Vancouverites, it was a promise to the federal government too. Council committed to the Villages in Vancouver’s application for the Housing Accelerator Fund, and CMHC is still tracking the Villages as a named item. We’ve already drawn down 90 million dollars from the fund and as a taxpayer, I don’t want you to put that money at risk. If you kill the federal golden goose, that means raising taxes or cutting services, there’s just no way around it. So to sum up, please follow through on what you started. Please follow through on one of your signature policies. Please keep your word to the voters who want to live in these villages, and to Ottawa so the city doesn’t lose a ton of money and credibility. Thank you for your time.
As is my wont, I think a lot about the history+policy that led us here. I’m in a pocket of East Van that popped up more or less overnight circa 1912 in a speculative building boom. Tons of cookie-cutter houses from Sears catalogs (that have since become quite nice+diverse due to the How Buildings Learn dynamic). In the 1960s, the area was downzoned to forbid apartments. And so my street is essentially frozen in the same physical shape from a century ago, even though a lot more people want to live here now. I am arguably a winner of this approach to urban planning; I get a house with a backyard in a very central area, at a (relatively) low price because I didn’t have to compete with apartments+condos for the land. It works out a lot worse for the people who are forced out to the ‘burbs.
screenshot from Dave Foley's Guy With A Good Attitude Toward Menstruation Kids in the Hall sketch
In old cities, the highest art is often maximizing visible greenery while minimizing GAR. That creates streetscapes of intense greenery at low cost. The tools of this approach are not swales and rain gardens, as useful as these may be, but window boxes, hanging pots, climbing vines and clay urns:
the Adventure Time banana guards